The new Caliphate, a.k.a. the Islamic State, has big plans for the future. After they finish wiping out the mushrikun and murtadeen in the Middle East and North Africa, it will be time to reclaim al-Andalus for the Ummah.

Many thanks to JLH for translating this article from Die Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung:

Madrid Shall Fall in 2020

Islamists of the terror organization ISIS give notice of their expansion into Europe

by Wolfgang Kaufmann July 22, 2014

“Oh Muslims, hasten to gather around your caliph, so you may become again what you were for years — kings of the world and knights of war.” With these words, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, Speaker of the Sunni-Salafist Organization “Islamic State (IS, previously ISIS), ended his 34-minute address at the beginning of Ramadan, in which he apprised the world of the foundation of a new caliphate.

On the same day, supporters of Caliph Ibrahim, alias Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, propagated a map via Twitter, showing the caliphate, whose territory comprehends the north and east of Syria and half of Iraq, and is expected to expand in the future like the historic caliphate of the 7th century, to include the Near and Middle East, North Africa, and then Spain, Portugal, Austria, southeast Europe, the Caucasus, central Asia and the sub-Saharan regions of Africa. And there was timeline for the planned annexations, in which, for instance, the fall of Madrid is announced for the year 2020.

Proof that this kind of statement does not result from the euphoria of a number of overzealous proponents, but accurately represents the intentions of the IS leadership, is in a personal appeal by the caliph — carried, among others, by “The Telegraph” — in which there is a further, especially symbolic goal of conquest: “Hasten to your new state, Muslims…That is my advice to you. If you follow it, you will conquer Rome and become masters of the world, by Allah’s will.”

Many commentators thoughtlessly assess this as mere swagger in the style of Osama bin Laden. But the IS is not al-Qaida. In contrast to that terror network — active worldwide, but splintered — it has a solid territorial base of circa 300,000 square kilometers, with prosperous metropolises and profitable oil fields. Therefore, IS can already finance its military campaigns with no problems. Estimates of the British secret service are that it has by now accumulated $2.4 million.

Furthermore, the resurrected caliphate, which quite explicitly intends to follow the tradition of the direct descendants of Mohammed and envisages the renewal of its empire, has a clear strategic concept that is far more attractive than that of al-Qaida, and has already mobilized Muslims from 70 countries.

In the third place, although IS is assessed as at most 25,000 men at this time, it must be taken seriously as a military power. It possesses captured US helicopters and tanks, howitzers and at least one SCUD with a range of up to 700 kilometers. Available weaponry, according to the “Los Angeles Times,” is sufficient to arm about 200,000 holy warriors. Not to be ignored is the death wish of religiously fired jihadists. That is how 800 IS attackers took Mosul from 30,000 government troops, after which their officers lamented: “We are fighting devils, not normal human beings.”

And now, in recent weeks, the IS has begun to take control of the dams along the Euphrates, which offers manifold opportunities for sabotage and extortion.

This is something coming to the region, but also to the rest of the world. which represents a completely new form of Islamist threat.

http://gatesofvienna.net/2014/07/madrid-here-we-come/
And a counter-point not in Spain but in the place where the 'Islamic State' grew up. I stink a faker of a 'news story' and so do the Russians, or at least this commentator on RT. I'm a bit, ahem, cagier than the typical American idiot- I get my news from diverse sources (including foreign news outlets. )

ISIS in Iraq stinks of CIA/NATO ‘dirty war’ op

or days now, since their dramatic June 10 taking of Mosul, Western mainstream media have been filled with horror stories of the military conquests in Iraq of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, with the curious acronym ISIS.

ISIS, as in the ancient Egyptian cult of the goddess of fertility and magic. The media picture being presented adds up less and less.

Details leaking out suggest that ISIS and the major military ‘surge’ in Iraq - and less so in neighboring Syria - is being shaped and controlled out of Langley, Virginia, and other CIA and Pentagon outposts as the next stage in spreading chaos in the world’s second-largest oil state, Iraq, as well as weakening the recent Syrian stabilization efforts.

Strange facts
The very details of the ISIS military success in the key Iraqi oil center, Mosul, are suspect. According to well-informed Iraqi journalists, ISIS overran the strategic Mosul region, site of some of the world’s most prolific oilfields, with barely a shot fired in resistance. According to one report, residents of Tikrit reported remarkable displays of “soldiers handing over their weapons and uniforms peacefully to militants who ordinarily would have been expected to kill government soldiers on the spot.”

We are told that ISIS masked psychopaths captured “arms and ammunition from the fleeing security forces” - arms and ammunition supplied by the American government. The offensive coincides with a successful campaign by ISIS in eastern Syria. According to Iraqi journalists, Sunni tribal chiefs in the region had been convinced to side with ISIS against the Shiite Al-Maliki government in Baghdad. They were promised a better deal under ISIS Sunni Sharia than with Baghdad anti-Sunni rule.

According to the New York Times, the mastermind behind the ISIS military success is former Baath Party head and Saddam Hussein successor, General Ibrahim al-Douri. Douri is reportedly the head of the Iraqi rebel group Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order as well as the Supreme Command for Jihad and Liberation based on his longstanding positions of leadership in the Naqshbandi sect in Iraq.

In 2009, US ‘Iraqi surge’ General David Petraeus, at the time heading the US Central Command, claimed to reporters that Douri was in Syria. Iraqi parliamentarians claimed he was in Qatar. The curious fact is that despite being on the US most wanted list since 2003, Douri has miraculously managed to avoid capture and now to return with a vengeance to retake huge parts of Sunni Iraq. Luck or well-placed friends in Washington?

The financial backing for ISIS jihadists reportedly also comes from three of the closest US allies in the Sunni world—Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

US passports?
Key members of ISIS it now emerges were trained by US CIA and Special Forces command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian officials. The US, Turkish and Jordanian intelligence were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region, conveniently near the borders to both Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two Gulf monarchies most involved in funding the war against Syria’s Assad, financed the Jordan ISIS training.

Advertised publicly as training of ‘non-extremist’ Muslim jihadists to wage war against the Syrian Bashar Assad regime, the secret US training camps in Jordan and elsewhere have trained perhaps several thousand Muslim fighters in techniques of irregular warfare, sabotage and general terror. The claims by Washington that they took special care not to train ‘Salafist’ or jihadist extremists, is a joke. How do you test if a recruit is not a jihadist? Is there a special jihad DNA that the CIA doctors have discovered?

Jordanian government officials are revealing the details, in fear that the same ISIS terrorists that today are slashing heads of ‘infidels’ alongside the roadways of Mosul by the dozens, or hundreds if we believe their own propaganda, might turn their swords towards Jordan’s King Abdullah soon, to extend their budding Caliphate empire.

Former US State Department official Andrew Doran wrote in the conservative National Review magazine that some ISIS warriors also hold US passports. Now, of course that doesn’t demonstrate and support by the Obama Administration. Hmm...

Iranian journalist Sabah Zanganeh notes, "ISIS did not have the power to occupy and conquer Mosul by itself. What has happened is the result of security-intelligence collaborations of some regional countries with some extremist groups inside the Iraqi government."

Iraq’s Chechen commander

The next bizarre part of the ISIS puzzle involves the Jihadist credited with being the ‘military mastermind’ of the recent ISIS victories, Tarkhan Batirashvili. If his name doesn’t sound very Arabic, it’s because it’s not. Tarkhan Batrashvili is a Russian - actually an ethnic Chechen from near the Chechen border to Georgia. But to give himself a more Arabic flair, he also goes by the name Emir (what else?) Umar al Shishani. The problem is he doesn’t look at all Arabic. No dark swarthy black beard: rather a long red beard, a kind of Chechen Barbarossa.

According to a November, 2013 report in The Wall Street Journal, Emir Umar or Batrashvili as you prefer, has made the wars in Syria and Iraq “into a geopolitical struggle between the US and Russia.”

That has been the objective of leading neo-conservatives in the CIA, Pentagon and State Department all along. The CIA transported hundreds of Mujahideen Saudis and other foreign veterans of the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan into Chechnya to disrupt the struggling Russia in the early 1990s, particularly to sabotage the Russian oil pipeline running directly from Baku on the Caspian Sea into Russia. James Baker III and his friends in Anglo-American Big Oil had other plans. It was called the BTC pipeline, owned by a BP-US oil consortium and running through Tbilisi into NATO-member Turkey, free of Russian territory.

Batrashvili is not renowned for taking care. Last year he was forced to apologize when he ordered his men to behead a wounded ‘enemy’ soldier who turned out to be an allied rebel commander. More than 8,000 foreign Jihadist mercenaries are reportedly in ISIS including at least 1,000 Chechens as well as Jihadists Saudi, Kuwait, Egypt and reportedly Chinese Uyghur from Xinjiang Province.

Jeffrey Silverman, Georgia Bureau Chief for the US-based Veterans Today (VT) website, told me that Batrashvili “is a product of a joint program of the US through a front NGO called Jvari, which was set up by US Intelligence and the Georgian National Security Council, dating back to the early days of the Pankisi Gorge.”

Jvari is the name as well of a famous Georgian Orthodox monastery of the 6th century. According to Silverman, David J. Smith—head of something in Tbilisi called the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, as well as the Potomac Institute in Washington where he is listed as Director of the Potomac Institute Cyber Centerr—played a role in setting up the Jvari NGO.

Silverman maintains that Jvari in Rustavi, near the capital, Tbilisi, gathered together Afghan Mujahideen war veterans, Chechens, Georgians and sundry Arab Jihadists. They were sent to the infamous Pankisi Gorge region, a kind-of no-man’s lawless area, for later deployment, including Iraq and Syria.

Batrashvili and other Georgian and Chechen Russian-speaking Jihadists, Silverman notes, are typically smuggled, with the assistance of Georgia’s Counterintelligence Department and the approval of the US embassy, across the Georgia border to Turkey at the Vale crossing point, near Georgia’s Akhaltsikhe and the Turkish village of Türkgözü on the Turkish side of the Georgian border. From there it’s very little problem getting them through Turkey to either Mosul in Iraq or northeast Syria.

Silverman believes that events in Northern Iraq relate to “wanting to have a Kurdish Republic separate from the Central government and this is all part of the New Great Game. It will serve US interests in both Turkey and Iraq, not to mention Syria.”

Very revealing is the fact that almost two weeks after the dramatic fall of Mosul and the ‘capture’ by ISIS forces of the huge weapons and military vehicle resources provided by the US to the Iraqi army. Washington has done virtually nothing but make a few silly speeches about their ‘concern’ and dispatch 275 US special forces to allegedly protect US personnel in Iraq.

Whatever the final details that emerge, what is clear in the days since the fall of Mosul is that some of the world’s largest oilfields in Iraq are suddenly held by Jihadists and no longer by an Iraqi government determined to increase the oil export significantly. More on this aspect in an upcoming article.